From the film "Limonádový Joe aneb Koňská opera", a very succesful Czech parody to American westerns. In this scene the main villain masked as an old blind man recounts his past and future to the beloved girl of the main hero. The language is often colloquial and sometimes the expressions need explanation.

From the film "Limonádový Joe aneb Koňská opera", a very succesful Czech parody to American westerns. In this scene the main villain masked as an old blind man recounts his past and future to the beloved girl of the main hero.

Lemonade Joe is not new for scrimshaw and others, but this song was not discussed so far.

Quote:

The language is often colloquial and sometimes the expressions need explanation.

We should add also that the villain deliberately mispronounce to sound like a lisping old man, so don’t take it as a norm.

Quote:

1 - karban = excessive gambling in cards

Why excessive? Any card playing is “karban”.

Quote:

14 - valchař - not sure about this one, most Czech do not know the word and neither do I... perhaps it is something like worker... or it has a connection with verb "valchovat"?

“Valcha” is Prague underworlds’ argotic term for an illegal or semilegal gambling session. A typical “valcha” is hold in privacy of somebody’s home, but it could be even in some pub or bar. Some of the underworlds’ pubs were even called so.

“Valchař” is either organizer or attendant of such a session, simply a gambler.

It seems I should renew my connections to the Prague underworld... my knowledge of argot needs to be updated

Anyway, the song is in my opinion quite difficult, so if someone does not understand, don't worry about that. I plan on adding some of the other songs from the film in near future._________________Non e merda flagrum texueris, etsi tamen, non castigabis autem

It is an example of an old toothles man speaking (or rather example of an actor performing a role of a villain fully capable of normal speech, trying to pretend an old toothless manspeaking ). It is called "šišlání" (lisping).

The man in your post was quite difficult to understand, but I would not call his speech gibberish at all, I would call it plain and simple hypo-articulation (which is indeed quite symptomatic for you Americans, I am affraid, but not to such an extent)._________________Non e merda flagrum texueris, etsi tamen, non castigabis autem

Hypoarticulation is generally just a neglectful pronunciation... consonant clusters are reduced, vowel qualities merge with one another, the buccal muscles are loosened and the overall inteligibilty of the utterance suffers. Most often, natives don't have problems understanding a hypoarticulated speech, in fact, some degree of hypoarticulation as quite normal if a person speaks casually because not all the acoustic information conveyed by the standard pronunciation is necessary for a clear comprehension. But some people are just omitting too much of it and while it still may be comprehensible to a native speaker (or... hearer, in this case:)), it does not usually sound very pleasant to his ear, unrefined as it may be._________________Non e merda flagrum texueris, etsi tamen, non castigabis autem

So, when a person hypoarticulates too much, it then becomes mostly incoherent sounds to anyone who is not really familiar with the language.

I saw on the internet once a similar concept but it dealt with reading.

The human eye sees what it expects to see.

There is a paragraph with a whole bunch of misspelled words.
But the sentences flow perfectly. Our eyes overlook the mistakes.
But when it says to read it again....then all the errors can be clearly seen.

So, when a person hypoarticulates too much, it then becomes mostly incoherent sounds to anyone who is not really familiar with the language.

I would rather say "incomprehensible" than "incoherent"...

scrimshaw wrote:

I saw on the internet once a similar concept but it dealt with reading.

The human eye sees what it expects to see.

There is a paragraph with a whole bunch of misspelled words.
But the sentences flow perfectly. Our eyes overlook the mistakes.
But when it says to read it again....then all the errors can be clearly seen.

The human mind is a funny thing.

Yes, it functions in a similar way... you receive a phonetic information but from the context and your knowledge of the code (language) you are able to deduce much that is lost or not present... our teacher of phonetics mentioned a colleague of his that had some presentation on a congress. She noticed she was quite in a hurry, so she spoke rather quickly. He remarked that she had reduced for example the phrase "to znamená" to something like /toza:/ with a highly nasalised final "á", but still it was completely intelligible (in the context of the utterance, of course... when isolated, it would sound very strange and no one would be able to identify what it was).

In English it can be extended even more, because you do not need vowels so much to identify your words, so you can meld their qualities... a good illustration (although not very precise, considering the vast gap between English orthography and English pronunciation) is wh0n y00 s0bst0t0t0 0v0r0 v0w0l b0 s0m0 d0mm0 s0mb0l r whn y jst wrt n vwls whtsvr... th rslt's smhw dffclt t rd bt ftr sm tm y bcm ccstmd t ths wy f wrtng nd rdng wtht prblms.